Estate: Fugitive Images

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

The pursuit of public housing provision was one of the 20th century's redeeming contributions. Yet, in the first decade of the 21st century, public housing as an ideal is contradictory territory resulting from the policies that value entrepreneurial charities or a subsidised private sector over state funded and administered housing.

Estate is a timely contribution to the debates entangling millions of individuals and countless neighbourhoods. The starting point is a visual essay on the Haggerston West & Kingsland Estates in Hackney, East London, in the process of demolition and rebuilding. The 56 photographs document the spaces left behind when people were moved out. Despite residents living in limbo for over 30 years as refurbishment plans were continuously proposed, shelved and re-proposed, the images highlight their innovative solutions to the difficulties of continuing to live while and idea and set of buildings were being abandoned around them.

Texts from Paul Hallam, Cristina Cerulli and Victor Buchli contextualise the artists' project through a broader set of questions resulting in a work that refuses to settle, creating dialogues between photographs, archaeology of the recent past, autobiography and critical theory.